Video phones: welcome to the futureA phenomenon is occurring across many organisations as high definition video telephony technologies mature and become affordable to the smallest of businesses. The phenomenon is “online collaboration” and it is becoming easier for remote individuals and teams to collaborate without the need for face-to-face meetings. From a solo consultant to the largest of enterprises there are now affordable solutions with hosted platforms that let you hook up with your clients, suppliers or staff across an office, a town, a country or the globe.

The traditional phone is deadWe are now reaching the star trek era but for the time warps and beam me up, Scotty! Multi-party video conferencing is now available at a small cost with tools that can offer desktop sharing, application sharing, digital whiteboards and much more. All with a softphone solution that can replace the traditional desk phone as well.Any computer screen and PC can now be turned into a telephony end point. There are even solutions to turn your mobile devices into video telephony tools.

The benefits are manyThanks to the latest collaboration technology people can work from wherever they are and join meetings effectively with no wasted travel time or recovery. There is more to this in that it also allows people to work internationally and collaborate on projects in ways that were previously not possible.Documents can be shared between nations and time zones and authored on the spot with no need to send them back and forth and use version control to bring them together. Now what took weeks can be achieved in hours to make small businesses internationally competitive. It is even becoming acceptable to do a sales presentation of a new technology via this mode as prospects are keener to hear about a solution quickly and remotely than to wait for a sales person to be in their area. This is expanding sales territories quickly and reducing the cost of finding well qualified leads. Today your company receptionist could work from home and connect in to the company system for 3 hours at a time twice a day from the home office and is able to direct calls throughout your office.

The possibilities are (almost) endlessThere are many applications for collaboration technology. If you are still using a conventional coper phone line or PBX based office phone system it is time you spoke with your IT company (not your phone company). This technology is arguably better suited to the IT team than the telephony people who some might say are going the way of the fax repair man and the telegraph office.

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